In every wedding toast in every movie, I felt like the father of the bride or some great-aunt told the couple, “Never go to bed angry.” Not only was I going to bed angry, I was falling asleep on a plane headed three thousand miles from my fiancé angry, and I wouldn’t see him for a month, possibly six. I’d found an email in my inbox that morning from Hannah asking me to reconsider, practically begging, and instead of giving her the resounding no I wanted to, I’d said I’d think about it. All of a sudden everything was up in the air.

I’d woken that morning at four to go to the airport and Dylan was collapsed on our bed, still in his clothes from the night before. I didn’t wake him. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t know what to say. I honestly didn’t know where we stood. We didn’t technically break up, but I didn’t know if we had a future. There was a pit in my stomach, an ugly knot that scared me. Was I crazy to get on that plane? Was my relationship going to die on the vine because my fiancé, my “bloody fiancé,” couldn’t tell his perfect ass from his perfect eyelashes, couldn’t pull that genius brain of his out of the sand for two seconds and realize that moving forward was the only way to move through?

I wanted to kill him. Except then he’d be gone, and I loved him too damn much for that. Even now, sitting in first class, I was annoyed. Initially I’d thought his upgrading my ticket without asking was sweet, but now it felt like a metaphor for our entire predicament. He was so preoccupied with keeping me safe and in the lap of luxury, so sure that he should be handling all of the enormous things on his plate by himself, that he didn’t even consult me. Not that I was actually complaining, at least not about first class on a transatlantic flight. But about the rest of it? I was livid. I wanted to tear my hair out with frustration. Didn’t he get it? We were a team. Or we were supposed to be. We’d promised to be.

Men and their infuriating need for independence. It was going to be the end of me. Only, I was actually afraid it was going to be the end of us. There was only so much more of this upper-crust stoic, “no, no, I mustn’t be a nuisance” man-is-an-island crap I could take.

“Excuse me, madame?” I looked up to see a blond Nordic-looking flight attendant waiting patiently for me to hand her the once-warm-now-cool damp towel I’d been wringing in my hands. Then I looked down only to realize I was practically tearing the thing to shreds.

“Oh, um, sorry,” I said, placing the towel in the basket she held.

Apparently this was getting to me. On the underside of my anger was sadness. I hated that I was going to be so far away, we weren’t going to have the chance to resolve it. And on the underside of that was worry. I could avoid thinking about it as much as I wanted, but the top plan that British intelligence was working with involved using Dylan for bait in a dangerous sting operation. I might have been angry with him, but I wasn’t ready to lose him to some stunt.

I closed my eyes and tried to push all of it aside, tried to find some sliver of calm, normal happy thoughts. I only half noticed that I was twisting my ring with my thumb as I drifted off, rhythmically turning it as though the solution to all of this would be unlocked.

Ten hours after I’d shut the door to the Belgravia house behind me, I was setting foot on New York soil for the first time in eight months.

I had packed light, just a roller bag with staples and a few other items—I’d be doing laundry and collecting some of my clothes from storage. So I felt oddly empty, just standing there with my purse over my shoulder, my hand on the small suitcase.

The New York spring air—always colder than you wanted it to be when you’re hankering for spring—was kissing my cheeks. The yellow cabs were lining up alongside those of us who were lining up for them, both of us waiting to get paired off. The American accents—my accent—filled my ears, and I caught glimpses of everything: the way people moved, how the air tasted on my tongue, the cars with their steering wheels on the left. A thousand minuscule things told me I was away from London.

In an instant I was taken back to the previous September when I’d been arriving at that same airport on the departures level, a crumbled notecard with Dylan’s phone number on it in my pocket. Luggage full of my best knockoff outfits. The keys to the Notting Hill house at the bottom of my tote. I’d been wearing my worn-in denim jacket. I’d been so excited to get to London. I’d been so eager to leave my grief behind. I’d had no idea what was coming.

Now I stood there, nearly eight months later. Inching forward in the taxi “queue”—and it was the word queue that rolled through my mind automatically, not line—in an Alexander McQueen black cashmere coat that Dylan had bought me in Greece. I stood there engaged to be married. I stood there completely changed by everything that had happened over the past months.

I’d had no idea that nearly a year after my father died, there would be a part of that grief that would clearly never waver, never fade. But I’d also had no idea just how effective leaving New York would be for pushing it to the side, avoiding it.

Standing on that bustling sidewalk, my luggage by my side, the smells of home woke up corners of my mind that had been lying dormant. Images of subway rides to Jackson Heights for Indian food flashed through me. The memory of when my father took me to the airport when I went visit a college in North Carolina (as if I’d ever have left New York back then) came to mind and was followed quickly by the memory of him being too sick to bring me anywhere just a couple of years later. I thought of our spring walks in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the taste of good coffee, the feeling of sitting on our stoop. For the first time in months, possibly years, I really thought of my life in New York, of who I was there, of what I’d lost there.

It wasn’t until a taxi attendant tapped me on the shoulder that I realized my cheeks were wet. That my chin was quivering. That I was crying for my father for the very first time.

Dylan and I still weren’t speaking, technically, so the silence was peppered only with the most minimal of texts, the first of which I sent when I got to the apartment.

As I pressed SEND I could feel that there was something almost worse about that one x than nothing. Something perfunctory. But I didn’t know what to say. The things I’d had to say couldn’t be said over text. And all of the important things had already been said. But they’d never been heard, and maybe they never would be. I didn’t know where we went from here. I wanted him. I wanted to marry him. But I wanted him to want to marry me, to have it be more important than his pride or his misguided ideas about separating us from the rest of his life.

He’d started and stopped returning my text for at least two minutes, the little dots appearing and disappearing, before his reply finally came through.

I’d sighed, sad, and tossed the phone on the bed, frustrated. Let me know if you need anything. Didn’t he get that that was what I was mad at, or part of it? I did need something, and it wasn’t a plane ticket upgrade. It was him.

I wished Daphne were there. Instead she was in Japan at some international law student conference. Figured. The one time I was actually in Brooklyn and needed her desperately, she was on the other side of the world and wouldn’t be back for another week. I sank onto the bed and closed my eyes, just trying to be comforted by the familiar smells.

My father had owned the apartment. He’d bought it back when that part of Park Slope was considered dangerous, when no one lived there. Now I owned it, which was strange to think about. I’d avoided thinking about it for a year—it had been rented through a management company, and the lease had run out the month before. I’d decided not to renew it, thinking I’d stay here for these few weeks and then maybe rent it to Daphne or even consider selling. Now I honestly wasn’t sure. Most of my father’s belongings had been boxed and put into storage along with my own furniture and clothes, the few things I’d accumulated in my brief stint of New York adulthood before abandoning the continent altogether. But there were still several boxes in a locked closet. I stared at that closet door for about ten minutes before I managed to roll off the bed, open the door, and begin my search for one box in particular.

I removed the framed photographs one by one and placed them in their original homes—my high school graduation picture went on the upright piano in the living room. The photo of my father and me next to the roller coaster at Coney Island belonged on the bookshelf by the window looking out onto the tree-lined street. The photo of the lemonade stand I’d set up at Grand Army Plaza when I was eight went on a shelf in the kitchen—my father had always said that it should go in my office someday. “Evidence of your business savvy,” he’d said. I’d have to remember to bring it back to London with me. Assuming I was going back to London. I put all the photos back in their places, and when I was done, I could somehow breathe easier.

I gave myself a buffer to settle in, to launder the sheets, buy fresh flowers and groceries, and take walks through my old neighborhood. I made the rounds, stopping to chat with the other people in our building and visiting my father’s friends at his favorite bar, Great Lakes. I called the Franklins, the family I used to babysit for, and made plans to have dinner with them and see the children. I took those days to reassemble the threads of my New York life, breathe it back in.

Then I rolled up my sleeves and dove into work. It was the only way I could make the day go by, could keep my mind off the eerie silence that awaited me every time I looked at my phone. I needed the focus, the escape. I spent a day speccing out the new space with the decorator and contractor. I spent hours on the phone with the manufacturers, checking shipment statuses. We had two weeks to finalize the pop-up space in SoHo before we opened. And I still had the Madison Ave shop to think about—I spent hours sifting through résumés for eager potential sales clerks and store managers. And each night there’d be one empty “goodnight” text, but otherwise it was still silence on the transatlantic Dylan–Lydia wire.

I caught myself smirking at one point, when my mood had morphed into a slightly sardonic post-coffee “well, I guess this is my life” phase. I was literally on my hands and knees, on the floor of the shop space in SoHo, screwing in an outlet cover—when I realized that this time I had fled to New York to escape problems in London. How recently I had been fleeing New York. The irony.

The days were endless flows of checking things off of lists, and I began to fill my evenings with I’m-back-in-town dinners with friends. Anything to keep me busy, to try to reassert my New York self. I felt like I was digging around for evidence that pre-Dylan Lydia could be found here. I wanted to find her, to find something solid while so much in my life felt like liquid.

And it worked to some extent. I did love walking to and from the familiar subway stop on Fourth Avenue and Union. I loved the smells of walking through Chinatown. I loved being on familiar ground. I loved the old faces of college friends around dinner tables, and the reminiscing that came with it. But it wasn’t complete. The dinners weren’t just reunions, they were reminders of the man I was missing so much. Sitting in a friend’s lounge—I meant living room (god, I really was becoming British)—in Greenpoint, someone asked me about my love life, and I’d had no idea what to say. I’d wanted to say I was engaged. I’d wanted to say, Well, actually, it’s kind of a crazy story. I’d wanted them to know about it. Because them not knowing about it, about Dylan, about us, made it all feel like maybe it just had been a dream. Somehow Dylan had become part of me, half of me, and now, sitting in front of my Brooklyn friends, who had no idea about us, I felt like half of me was missing.

A week. This went on for over a week. One empty text a day, but no other communication. We should have talked, figured this out before I’d left. But I hadn’t. We hadn’t, and now I didn’t know where we stood. I wasn’t even sure what needed to be said, what could be said.

On the tenth day, as I walked from the subway to the shop at seven in the morning—I had only four more days to prepare the space before the shop opened for its two-week-long stint—my phone rang, and Dylan’s face graced the screen.

“Hi,” I said, stepping through the gate of the playground I’d been passing.

“I hate this,” he said as I was sitting down on the swing, pushing myself back on my heels.

“Me too.”

“Damsel, I…” He trailed off, never finishing his thought.

I don’t know what I was waiting for, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t an admission that this sucked. That we missed each other. The longer his silence went, the clearer it was that this wasn’t going to be the conversation where we figured things out. Where we made up.

“Dylan, I have to get to the store,” I finally said, leaning back and staring into the cloudy morning sky, as if it would provide me with the answers I wanted. The answers I’d been hoping he’d give.

He sighed audibly on the other end. “I miss you.”

“I miss you too,” I said, and I could feel the tears forming in my eyes. Because I did. I missed the crap out of him. I missed sleeping in his arms. I missed waking up next to him. I missed him touching me. I missed teasing him. I missed everything, and at that moment there was a part of me that was afraid we’d never get it back.

More silence. “I gotta go,” I said and hung up the phone. I swung my tote over my shoulder, picked my coffee up from the ground, and walked towards the park exit.

My phone buzzed in my hand.